Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“That’s right,” Ptolemy added. And he and the woman Shirley Wring smiled for each other across the bright-yellow plastic table.

“We got to get back home, Uncle,” Robyn said finally, to fill in and end the silence.

The days passed in a new kind of harmony for the old man. The TV stayed off unless Robyn wanted to watch her shows at night. Ptolemy refused to have her leave it on for him or turn to his news station. He wanted to run the TV himself without any help. If he couldn’t do that, then he wouldn’t ever be able to find his treasure and save his family; he would fail the way he failed Maude Petit and Floppy in that tarpaper house on the outskirts of town.

For the same reason the radio stayed off.

Sometimes Robyn would go out with Beckford Ross, Reggie’s old friend. Some nights she didn’t get in until hours after Ptolemy fell asleep. But the old man did not chastise her. Robyn was looking after him, and she needed to be free, like the birds his father didn’t want him to feed.

Twice a week for three weeks Shirley Wring came over in the afternoon to sit with Ptolemy and converse.

The talks always started pretty well. Ptolemy would tell her about his mother and father and their poor sharecropper’s farm; he’d talk about Coy and a treasure that was lost and her green ring. But after a while he could see in her eyes that he wasn’t making sense. She didn’t frown or get bored, but her smile became soft and her dim eyesight focused on something other than what he was saying. At this point he’d offer her tea and she would say that it was time for her to get home, “before the sun goes down and the thugs come out.”

During this time Ptolemy received a letter from his bank. The letter contained a plastic card that had his name printed in gold at the bottom. Robyn took him to a machine that had a TV screen in it in a shopping mall on Crenshaw. There she put the card in the slot and asked him, “What is the favorite name you like to spell, Uncle?”

“Double-u ara eye en gee?”

“Can you press those buttons?”

He did it twice and the card came back out of the slot.

“From now on all you got to do is remember those lettahs and this machine will give you money,” the child told the old man.

“For free?”

“Naw, Uncle. They take it outta that bank account we started.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, not remembering and disgusted with himself for the lapse.

At a store called Merlyn’s, in the same mall, using his new bank card, Ptolemy bought Robyn a white wooden bed that sat atop three big drawers with pink handles. There was a padded board at the back of the bed that could be folded up to make the bed into a couch. They also got new sheets and blankets, pillows, and bright-red cushions for when the bed would be used as a couch.

When the bed was delivered the next day, Robyn grinned at the men assembling it.

After they left she took her uncle by the hand and pulled him until he was sitting next to her on the well-made bed.

“Are you gonna marry Shirley Wring and kick me outta here, Uncle Grey? I don’t care if you do. I mean, it’s your house and you could do what you want, but I nevah had no nice new bed before, and I’d like it if I could take it with me if you told me I had to go.”

“You wanna go and here we just got your bed?”

“No. I thought you loved Shirley Wring.”

“I’m too old for that. At this age I can only love chirren . . . like you. I love you.”

Robyn got down on her knees, took her faux uncle’s hands, and pressed her face against them.

They stayed like that for a long while, the man sitting up straight and the girl on her knees.

“Are you gonna leave me, Robyn?”

“No, not nevah, Uncle Grey. Not nevah.”

Robyn cooked and cleaned and slept in Ptolemy’s living room every night after that. They took walks in the neighborhood and never once saw Melinda Hogarth.

Niecie called twice.

“Pitypapa is sick an’ I got to take him to the doctor and give him his medicine,” Robyn told her guardian. “But I’ma come home when he bettah.”

“Bless you, child,” Niecie said.

Things went along like that for three weeks, until it was time for their appointment with Dr. Ruben.

The office was a block north of Melrose, on the west side of town. They took the bus and Ptolemy hummed to himself while one young man after another tried to get Robyn’s attention. She smiled and lied and sometimes just ignored them while Li’l Pea and Coy McCann fished almost a century before in the old man’s mind.

The doctor had a room in a courtyard of professional offices that surrounded a beautiful rose garden. The roses were white and gold, red and bright yellow. Ptolemy smiled while Robyn led him along.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said. “What is this place?”

“The doctor’s, remembah?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah.”

There was no nurse or receptionist, just a large room with a desk on one side and an examining table on the other. Robyn and Ptolemy sat in cushioned chairs before the desk.

Bryant Ruben was a white man of medium height, age, and build. He had a great mustache that made Ptolemy smile and beady green eyes that were not at all off-putting. The doctor’s voice was clear and strong. This made Ptolemy think that even if they were across the Tickle River from each other, he would still be able to understand the smiling doctor’s words.

It started with a memory test.

The doctor would recite a list of words, like apple , tomato , pinecone , orange , sparrow , and stone , and then ask Ptolemy to repeat them.

“ Orange stone and, and, somethin’,” he answered on the first try.

After eight lists, Dr. Ruben smiled.

“I’m going to ask you to strip down to your shorts and sit on the examining table, Mr. Grey. Would you rather your niece wait in the garden?”

“No. She could see me right here. I don’t mind. I’m too old to be worried about bein’ naked.”

Ruben examined Ptolemy from head to toe with a rubber hammer, a stethoscope, and a pair of magnifying glasses that had double lenses and sat on the end of his nose.

“Ninety-one, eh, Mr. Grey?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re in wonderful physical condition for a man your age. You can put on your clothes and we’ll talk at the desk.”

Robyn helped her charge with his pants and shirt and then got down on her knees to tie his brown shoes.

“Those shoes is older than you, girl,” Ptolemy said, and Robyn stood and kissed his cheek.

Your uncle is in the early stages of dementia,” Ruben said to Robyn. “Maybe a little bit further along than that, but not much. He can converse with difficulty and has some trouble with immediate memory. I believe, however, that the damage is not so far along that it can’t be ameliorated.”

Ptolemy didn’t mind the doctor explaining to the child. She was his eyes and ears in a world just out of reach. She deciphered what things meant and then told him like a busboy in a restaurant that runs down to the waiter and then comes back with information for the cook.

“What does that mean, Doctor?”

“He’s losing the ability to use his mind to solve problems, remember things, and to communicate. His language skills are still pretty strong, but his cognitive abilities are weakening.”

“What’s cognitib—?” Robyn asked, frowning, trying to understand what she could do for him.